Assessing the utility of low-emission pilot policies for facilitating pollution reduction and carbon mitigation: An...

Collaborative governance for pollution reduction and carbon mitigation can effectively resist the pressure brought about by ecological and environmental changes while reducing policy costs. To explore the "win-win" path of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation," based on panel data from 286 cities in China from 2000 to 2021, this study regards the low-carbon city pilot policy (LCCP) as a quasi-natural experiment and explores its impact on urban carbon emissions and pm_2.5 concentration. Multiple testing methods, including multi-temporal double difference, spatial autocorrelation, local cold and hot spot analysis, kernel density analysis, standard deviation ellipse, spatial Durbin model, and PSM-DID, were used to verify the credibility and scientificity of the research results. The results showed that (1) LCCP had a direct effect on reducing pollution and carbon emissions, reducing co₂ emissions by 3% and pm_2.5 by 2.9%, with a synergistic effect of 20.2%; (2) the synergistic effect of LCCP on pollution and carbon reduction was indirectly achieved through green finance, green technological innovation, and green transportation, with impacts of 3.6%, 5.5%, and 2.4% in eastern, central, and non-resource based cities, respectively; and (3) the spillover effect coefficient of LCCP on carbon emission reduction in surrounding cities was -0.040 and that on pm_2.5 concentration was -1.232, which are significant at the 10% and 1% levels, respectively.